Probably the fact that we didn't have any choice. The infancy of Euronext is very simple. ICE bought Euronext, decided to do the cherry picking in the portfolio asset they bought. So they kept the derivative markets of life in London that was part of the... they kept a few other good things, and what Jeff Sprecher didn't want to keep was the cash equity trading business in continental Europe because he felt that, like everyone, that the cash equity trading was low growth, low margin, and that Europe was very complicated. So we had a collection of assets when the company was re-IPOed for 1.4 billion market cap, which was not very sexy, and a few months later the CEO resigned after the IPO, and I joined in November 15, and a few weeks after I joined, London Exchange announced that they were going to merge with Deutsche. So it was really a cloudy environment. So we had no other choice than working hard on the performance. The first thing we've done, and that's the first recipe of success, is that we worked very hard on the operational and operating performance. The EBITDA margin and the ownership in 2013 was 27% before the IPO, after a few months of ICE ownership it was 40%, and we took it to 58%. Operating performance was a condition for independence. Performance is a fundamental condition of independence. So this culture of cost management, of yield management, of market share management, of topline obsession, no tolerance for leakage, was a condition for survival that has become a part of the DNA of the organization.
Hence the fact that today in a world which is totally different from the beginning of the story, we are better equipped to fight inflation than the others because cost management is embedded in our DNA. We have beaten our cost guidances despite inflation because for us, resisting and fighting inflationary pressures on cost is part of just cost management. So it's not change of nature, it's change of dimension of scale. The other thing was to be agile in terms of M&A because of this operating performance we built a free cash flow generation machine, and then the issue is to deploy this capital through M&A, and what we have tried to do is to punch above our weight permanently, to dribble within the legs of tall guys, and that's what we have done because we are always trying to buy assets against people who have much bigger checkbooks than we have. We are always the smaller, the challenger, and we have never been the incumbent. Never, never. And if you're agile in deploying capital and do more mobile things than others, you can build... you can buy the Irish chain, you can buy Oslo Børs as we've done against NASDAQ, and NASDAQ had much more powerful resources to prevent us from buying Oslo Børs, and they did not manage to do it because we operated in a more agile manner. We bought Borsa Italiana against Dutch Bourse and against SIX who had much bigger checkbooks, both of them, because we did things that they could not replicate even with a lot of money.
We operate historically since 2000 in France, in Belgium, in the Netherlands, and since 2001 in Portugal. Then we bought the Irish stock exchange in Dublin. Then Oslo Børs in Norway. Then CSD in Denmark, VP Securities. Then we bought Borsa Italiana, and we have also operations in Sweden, technology platforms in Finland. We have also a team in New York that does forex trading, etc.
Every day I speak Norwegian English, British English, Irish English, French English, Dutch English, Belgian English, Portuguese English, Italian English. You have to understand, and I know it's difficult from a US perspective, that European countries are embarked into a bottom-up federal ambition. We are building capital market union, but we are building a federal organization. It's very different from your federal system because your federal system was all about taking people who have more or less the same culture and live in a large continent and putting a grid on the map and deciding more or less how they should organize themselves. Here we are talking about a bottom-up process where people who have been fighting against each other for a thousand years are trying to team up to pool their sovereignty and to decide to pull their destiny in common, and that works well because even if there are big cultural differences, clearly you don't do business in Italy, in particular in Rome, as you do it in Stockholm in Sweden, still all over Europe there are some very fundamental values that are totally identical: democracy, rule of law, independence of justice, freedom of speech, market economy, social cohesion. That's very identical, and the commitment to make to proceed towards some form of unity is there everywhere in the business community and to a large extent within the general public. So we have a federal governance. On paper, this federal governance should be the reservoir for jokes about the European hell and the European paradise. I have in my supervisory board eight nationalities for 10 supervisory board members. In my exco, I have 10 nationalities for 15 members. So normally it should be extremely complicated. The reality is that it works extremely well as long as you are respectful, as long as you tell the truth, as long as you don't play with understatements and that you are extremely explicit, as long as you are really committed, as long as you deliver what you said, it works extremely well.
2023 is a very pivotal year where we will be delivering all the synergies of the large deal we have announced and we have completed 18 months ago, which is the acquisition of the Borsa Italiana group. We said when we announced the deal and when we completed it in April 21 that we would be delivering 60 million of synergies, and we have revised that to now 150, almost double this acquisition, and the integration of this acquisition is deploying extremely well. We have completed the migration of the Oko data center from Basel near London to Bergamo near Milan in June. In 14 months between announcement and up and running delivery, in a few weeks time, I think two weeks on the 27th of March, we'll be migrating all the Italian markets towards our single liquidity pool, single order book, single technology platform, which will be a massive moment for synergies. In October we will be delivering the migration of the derivatives market to the single liquidity pool, the single order book. A few weeks later we will be migrating clearing. So 23 will be a year of acceleration and actually almost completion of the delivery of synergies in Italy. So Euronext is going to change scale for real. This year at the end of this year already, we will be generating in terms of run rate synergies 70 million more than where we were before the acquisition of the company. So it's a pivoting year in many respects.
